K Jeter - The Kingdom of Shadows

Pavli wondered if any of the guards had managed to escape. It didn’t seem likely to him; the forest’s silence told him that he and the smaller creatures were the only things left alive in it. He looked down at himself. His own chest and arms were smeared with blood, a red hieroglyphic roughened with dirt and broken twigs. He brushed away as much as he could, his fingertips dragging against the sticky markings.

The marks of his feet in the snow patches led him back to the cross he’d made. His brother Matthi’s skin was no longer draped upon it; that lay a few feet before it, the arms carefully outspread, the empty face gazing up at the clouded sky. Its chest and hands were daubed with red as well. The voice that spoke at Pavli’s ear had been a thing of the night, now silent in the first shadows of day.

Threads of blood spiraled around the upright branch of the cross. Impaled at the top was the head of Herr Doktor Ritter, the wooden end thrust up through the gaping throat. The eyes had been torn out, the sockets weeping red into the mouth dangling open. A few yards away was the rest of the corpse, lines across the ground showing where it had been dragged from elsewhere.

Bright metal glittered at the base of the cross. Pavli bent down and picked up an ornate knife; he recognized it as Ritter’s dagger, that he had kept on his desk at the asylum. Of all the things there, he had taken this, the ceremonial emblem of his membership in the SS. Pavli rubbed a finger along the words inscribed on the blade. Meine Ehre hei?t Treue. His fingertip came away marked with blood still wet.

He found his clothes and the black leather bag farther away. A streamlet of melted snow trickled nearby; he broke the ice covering it and washed himself, the cold tightening his flesh.

He debated throwing away Ritter’s dagger, but finally tucked it inside his shirt, snugged against the waistband of his trousers. Alone, and with far to go, he might have need of it. He knelt down with the bag beside his brother’s skin; he carefully folded the silken matter and placed it inside, then drew the strap through the buckle. There had been no possibility of his leaving this part of his brother behind, with the profane corpses lying among the trees.

Standing up, he held the bag close to his chest. In the distance, he could hear the faint noises of machinery, the rumbling of tanks and heavy artillery vehicles. He had no way of knowing to which army they might belong. If the battle began again, it would sweep over him like a fiery tide, crushing him beneath its treads. He would have to hurry, reach some kind of sanctuary before the earth split open once more.

His exhausted brain could think only of the way back to Berlin, the narrow roads by which the trucks had brought the Lazarenes to the asylum so long ago. If he could reach the city, there would be places he could hide, the curtains drawn over the windows of the bedroom he had shared with Matthi, the cellar of his uncle’s house, the alleys twisting around themselves, where he could elude any pursuers…

There was nowhere else to go.

Pavli wished his brother would speak to him again, tell him what to do, as Matthi had told him during the long dreaming night that had just ended. But he couldn’t wait for another night to come. The images of that dreaming – the shadows of ravens, the terrified faces of the guards before the blood was made to leap from their throats – tangled inside his skull. There had been another, whose face had been impossible to see beneath a darkened hood, a figure striding through the forest, implacable in the stalking of its prey. He tried to remember, but that was all, only that glimpse as he had fallen beneath the heavy sky.

His legs ached with the temptation to lie down, to curl next to the crucifix with the blind head staked above. To sleep, and wait, to let his dreaming unravel itself and become a memory he could grasp. But there was no time for that.

The bag of black leather, with its silken weight inside, dangled from his hand as he started walking toward home.

“This is impossible, Herr von Behren. We cannot shoot in these conditions.”

He looked up from the pages of the script. His hands trembled with fatigue; he had to force his grip tighter, to keep the papers with his own typed words from slipping away and scattering at his feet. The assistant director’s accusing, impatient glare met his own red-rimmed gaze.

“Oh?” Von Behren rested his elbows on the wooden arms of the folding chair. He received the impression that the young man standing there blamed him for everything that happened. “And why is that?”

The assistant director stared at him in disbelief. “Are you mad?” He shouted to make himself heard above the sounds that battered the studio’s walls. “The Russians are outside the city!” His hands lifted, shaking in agitation. “It’s not a matter of weeks or days now – it will be only hours before they’re in the streets!”

“Yes… yes, of course…” Von Behren slowly nodded. He found the other’s voice more exhausting than all the bombs and artillery shells. How could the fellow raise his voice so? His own lungs were silted with ash, from the breathing of the smoke that darkened the Berlin air. When he could sleep, curling up on a pile of mildewed stage curtains that served as a bed for all the actors and crew, he would awake panting, his heart as loud as the explosions that strode among the burning buildings. The littlest of his actresses, a skinny creature of barely fifteen years, had crept into his arms, whimpering with fright, and he had rocked her until dawn, kissing her on the top of her head and telling her that everything would be all right. That was why he had not left to go to his own flat for… he couldn’t remember how long it had been. For all he knew, his flat, with his shelves of books and desk piled with unfinished scripts, all his memories, no longer existed. That district had taken a pounding from the American night bombers; he had been able to see the flames mounting up from outside the studio, the fire spreading from one building to the next, smoke roiling through the beams of the flak searchlights. He hadn’t even sent one of his assistants to check whether his flat had survived. It didn’t matter; he belonged here, with the ones who had come – it seemed so odd – to depend upon him. In the morning, after a particularly bad night, their hands would shake as they sipped at cups of ersatz coffee, their eyes dark-rimmed from lack of sleep. And they would turn and look at him, waiting for his instructions on what to do next, to flee or carry on with the filming of Der Rote Jager.

“ Herr von Behren – are you listening to me?”

He stood up, laying the script, with its notations on camera angles and lighting in the margins, on the chair behind him. “I heard you. God knows I should be deaf by now, with all this racket, but I’m not.” He pushed his way past and strode out to the middle of the studio space. He clapped his hands once for attention, though he knew he didn’t need to. All eyes turned toward him, those of the crew behind the lights and cameras, the carpenters and painters repairing the damage to the scenery flats that had been knocked over by the shockwaves, and the actors, already in costume and ready to take their marks. The shooting schedule, after so many delays, had last come round to the script’s grand banquet scene. Heavy, medieval-looking tables were laden with the clever imitations of food that the propmakers had cobbled together from colored plaster and modeling clay. “Please, everyone – I have an announcement to make.”

The actors appeared surreal against the machinery of filming, a confusion of time and place; the men in their doublets and hose, chains of faux gold brightened with glycerine around their necks, dangling barbaric emblems of rank, the women’s long gowns heavy with intricate embroidery, their hair upswept and laced with the beads that would photograph as strands of pearls. Outside the studio, the twentieth century collapsed in flame and ruin, while this little bubble of the middle ages shivered with each blow.